Ideals and Failure: Sins of Commission

The dictums of Buddhism regarding right livelihood are clear, as are those of right thought, words and actions. However, farming is a messy business at best, and day-to-day life entails compromise and our human capacity for mendacity, miscalculation, mistake or misfortune.

This sets a potential trap. Aspiring to meet the dictums of right livelihood (or any other ‘right’ action) we can punish ourselves when commit individual actions that knowingly or inadvertantly fall short of the ideal.

One of my discomforts with the Abrahamic faiths is the strong focus on the inevitability of sin, and some future terminal reckoning for those sins. In essence we are doomed not only to failure, but also to some future ultimate judgement for our failures against an somewhat uncertain but nonetheless daunting standard.

One of the consolations of Buddhist thought is its essential acknowledgement of our humanity with all its contradictions, lusty wilfulness and frailty. It includes our capacity for unwise action, makes no real judgement on those actions, instead highlighting the inevitable and very real immediate and ongoing consequences of those actions.

In essence Buddhism and the Abrahamic faiths share the acknowledgement that as humans we inevitably err. But their interpretation of the basis for error and the consequences of our errors are fundamentally different.

For example Christianity, my native faith, talks of our capacity for evil, damnation, repentance and redemption in some future state. Notwithstanding a Christ who can cleanse us of our sin – a concept that I find both consoling and somewhat disturbing – Christianity has always played on the anticipation of future gross fear of eternal damnation and sublime forgiveness as motivators for ethical action in the present moment.

By contrast, Buddhism reduces the world to the nexus of now. It focuses on our capacity to act in each present moment either skilfully or unskilfully with respect to suffering.

In Christianity we are told that we are born sinners and God will punish us at some future date for our sins. In Buddhism there is a clear understanding that suffering is the ‘punishment’ for unwise actions. It is not withheld until some day of judgement, but flows from the moment of action. It is the difference between being punished (by God) for our sins, as Christianity suggests, and being punished by (the karmic consequences of) our ‘sins’.

In Buddhism the degree to which we suffer now and into the future depends on how we choose to act now and into the future. We are released from the guilty burden of past and future failures, but must firmly face up to our responsibility for our current actions and acknowledge their potential consequences.